protests – Gretchen A. Peck

I was talking to some Boomer-generation family members not long ago, who’d expressed frustration about the state of the world — not about big things, like war or the state of democracy, but about small, comparatively insignificant things. They complained about how nothing interested them on TV anymore, about the popularity of Taylor Swift, and how print menus had been replaced by QR codes. These grievances seemed petty to me, so I found myself imparting wisdom I gained far too late in life: “Not everything is made for you,” I told them.

It dawned on me that if you see things in the world in two categories — things you like = good; things you don’t like = bad — you’ll live your life in a state of perpetual frustration or agitation. It’s a far more pleasant existence to think, just because I don’t like something — just because it wasn’t produced with me as an audience or consumer in mind — doesn’t make something bad, unworthy, corrosive or a danger to society. Other people may like it, and they have a right to enjoy it and to exist, and it need not have any impact on you at all.

This same philosophy can — and should — be applied to people and lifestyles, too.

I thought about this as I read reporter Peggy Noonan’s account of attempting to interview protesters on Columbia University’s campus. She wrote about how they didn’t want to talk to her. “Friends, please come say hello and tell me what you think,” she implored them.

Frankly, if that’s how she approached the students, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that they opted not to speak with her. “Friends …” does make it sound a bit disingenuous, like someone trying to draft you into a religious sect.

Journalist Peter Baker of The New York Times boosted Noonan’s remarks on X/Twitter, implying the students wouldn’t speak to her because they weren’t capable of articulating their reason for protesting.

That’s an assumption journalists are trained not to make. Also, it’s likely not true. Just look how poised, thoughtful and resolved this student was when speaking to Fox News: https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1786088434806792573

Last week, when I spoke with several editors of school newspapers on campuses around the country, they all talked about students’ reluctance to speak to the press.

You can read the article, “When war abroad comes to campus” for FREE here: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/when-war-abroad-comes-to-campus-student-newspapers-meet-the-moment-with-on-the-ground-coverage-of,249586

The editors explained to me that the student protesters — in fact their entire generation — is media savvy but also distrustful of the press. They worry of their remarks being misunderstood or intentionally misconstrued. They’ve grown up in an era in which “fake news” is a familiar concept and social media can make one inarticulate remark take on a life of its own.

Anish Vasudevan, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Orange at Syracuse University, explained how student protesters on campus have designated “media-trained” spokespersons expressly for these reasons.

As I spoke with these student journalists, it also confirmed how much newsroom “representation” matters today, especially among young people. They’re more inclined to feel seen, heard and understood when they’re talking to reporters who have some shared perspective, whether that’s ethnicity, gender, geography, race, language, education, a common campus, age or generation.

In many cases, student reporters were able to land the most meaningful interviews with their fellow students, because representation matters. It helps repair some of the deteriorated trust in news media when we see ourselves represented among the storytellers.

Maybe this story — this moment in history — isn’t for journalists like Noonan or Baker to chronicle. And that’s ok.

Not everything is made for you.

Unlike George Floyd, who literally choked out his last words …

“Don’t kill me.”

“Momma.”

“I can’t breathe.”

… I only figuratively choke on words to chronicle this moment in our nation’s history. I feel inadequate and inarticulate. Nothing I can put to paper is profound enough. What can I write that I haven’t said before, after each injustice I’ve paid witness to in my lifetime — this life of mine that tonight feels privileged and impossibly long?

What have I not already said about the racial disparities that plague our culture? How can I, an inept bystander really, somehow define and encapsulate the festering wounds of racism and our pathetic inability to destroy it, once and for all?

I think I choke on these words because it’s not my story to tell. I think on these matters, as a white person who knows that I can go about my days — somedays even myself breaking laws — without that omnipresent fear that others will inherently aim to target me, harass me, disparage me, or even kill me, I might be best to shut the fuck up and listen, or better yet, to act as a conduit, a megaphone for others who know these atrocities firsthand.

I need to do a better job at making sure those stories are told. That is my mission and vow.

I may be better equipped to speak about protests. A child of the 60s and 70s, I have been witness to Vietnam-era rebellions, Los Angeles, Ferguson, and all the modern-era injustices that have led people to the streets to speak to their rage, to show the world their anguish.

I have myself marched, when there seemed like no other way to break through. This is all too familiar to me.

Tragically, rather than acknowledging their numbers and hearing their cries – rather than listening to their plight and empathizing with their anger – too many in this country will look at anecdotal property destruction and discount these protesters’ voices, wholesale. They will criticize them, or worse, tsk-tsk them and just move on about their days.

I sat up all night again, watching live feeds of fires burning in businesses, a news network under siege, tear gas canisters flying, and I think back to a demonstration I took part in years ago. I found myself side-by-side with a perfectly mild-mannered and otherwise peaceful, law-abiding person, who was so caught up in the moment, so unable to tamp down his rage, that he screamed out, “Burn it all down!”

That’s what rage does to human beings. That’s what being unheard, for years, decades, centuries, does to us.

As the day breaks, American cities will awaken to carnage today. They will find their neighbors and friends nursing wounds, glass on the streets, fires still smoldering. Talking heads on TV and social-media commenters will ponder, “Why have they done this? What purpose does it serve?”

They don’t understand it, because they haven’t tried to understand it.

I think about erupting rage and wonder how this anger is any less valid than the grievances that inspired this nation to elect Donald J. Trump as our 45th President? So often I’ve heard from Trump voters who say they voted for him to “drain the swamp,” to “shake things up.”

What they really meant was, “Burn it all down.”

The thing is, when you have that level of power – as a member of Congress or as President – burning it down proves rather easy and clean. No muss, no fuss. You don’t need to take the streets. K Street comes to you. You meet in chambers at the Capitol and with pen strokes, you dismantle it. You exploit that rage that sent you there to undermine law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the very system of justice that governs our land. You quietly leverage the courts to take mere access to healthcare away from millions who desperately need it. You slickly undermine public education. You put a price tag on the environment and sell it to the highest bidder. You champion war criminals and demote military heroes. You strike down laws intended to protect workers and people from businesses that will harm them and make them sick. You enrich your friends and starve the rest.

You challenge long-established Constitutional laws, because you can, and because you feel it’s what you were elected and emboldened to do.

You see a plague coming and you shrug it off, knowing that it might kill millions, especially in the cities for which you have disdain, cities that didn’t vote for you.

You burn it all down while surrounding yourself with blue-suited middle-aged white men cheering you on, never getting any grime on your hands at all. It’s all disgustingly dignified.

But the People don’t have that power. They’ve got to get their hands dirty.

The People don’t have those commemorative Executive Order-signing pens. They only have the streets. They only have their rage. They have only year after year of screaming into a void. And, so, they want to burn it all down the only way they know how, until the powerful listen, until they command their attention, until the change they demand comes.

Tag: protests

On Noonan, philosophy, protesters and newsroom representation

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